Brand Video Breakdown: How Oreo Uses Bursts of Short Social Videos To Keep Their Audience Engaged

The verdict is out: shorter video on social typically performs better. While there’s definitely a place for long-form content on social media, the standard rule of thumb is that shorter videos (a minute or under, if not thirty seconds or less) will be most impactful and achieve the highest viewer retention rates.

This means, of course, that you need a lot of super short social videos to keep your brand relevant in your audience’s mind and maintain engagement.

When plenty of clients come to us, they originally aren’t always entirely sure what this looks like, but great examples are typically easy to find. In this brand video breakdown, we’re going to take a close look at how the well-known Oreo brand uses bursts of super short social videos and how you can adapt the same strategy for your brand, too.

The Brand: Oreo

I’m fairly certain that the vast majority of our blog’s readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the famous chocolate-on-the-outside-cream-filling-on-the-inside cookie that has been around since the early 1900’s.

Here’s what’s great about Oreo though: Even though they’ve been around a very long time, this company has readily and rapidly adopted to marketing trends throughout history. It likely helps that they’ve certainly got enormous marketing teams and excellent strategists, but it’s still worth noting because not all large brands necessarily feel the need to keep people consistently engaged the same way this company does.

Customer engagement has long been a big focus for this company, which is why we see campaigns like their current Mystery Flavor, which requires users to taste the cookie and then see if they can guess the flavor of the cream filling for the chance to win $ 50,000. They’ve also run a #MyOreoCreation challenge, rewarding one user with $ 500,000 for creating a great oreo flavor combination and generating thousands of UGC posts and videos.

In order to keep their audience engaged regularly, though, Oreo is using bursts of super short but super fun videos to keep people engaged on multiple platforms on social, which works well on its own and strengthens its bigger campaigns. Let’s look at this specifically.

The Strategy

Short and simple often works best when it comes to video marketing, and that’s something that Oreo has on lock.

There’s one more thing they do, however, that more brands need to work on: Their videos are diverse.

They adapt their video content to each platform as necessary, showing a strong understanding of which audience niches are hanging out on which platforms and how they’re using each one. They’ve got fun product videos that are meant to stand out in the feed, even though they’re incredibly simple, and they don’t come across as too-salesy because they’re entertaining and visually interesting.

They’ve also got how-to content focusing on recipes for using their oreos that they share on multiple social sites (including Instagram and Pinterest), encourage users to purchase the product, and they’ve got everything from UGC to contest promotion content.

Then, on top of all that, they’ve also good the feel-good content that people love to share, showing happy kids and families dunking the cookies into a glass of milk. In some cases they add influencer marketing into these videos, too, for some extra visibility.

All their videos, though, are short– and there’s a lot of them. They’re using the scale-oriented strategy that we regularly discuss here on the Shakr blog, relying on short-enough-to-get-views but frequent-enough-to-stay-relevant videos to maximize their engagement on social media.Note that this doesn’t mean that they’re only creating video content; the videos are mixed in between even more image-oriented posts. The videos are frequent enough, however, that they help grab user attention in otherwise static feeds and can help the brand bump up its placements in the algorithm.

How To Adapt This Strategy For Your Brand

Oreo is a big company, and they’re nearly guaranteed to have enormous marketing teams. That doesn’t mean, however, that this strategy will only work for them, because that’s just not the case.

We created Shakr so that we could help even the smallest brands quickly create high quality, engaging videos that feel personalized to your audience and that scale well. You can take a single video template, upload some clips, and make small tweaks to have three different videos in a matter of minutes. There’s a reason we’re always talking about the road to 1000 videos in a year, and it’s because an unprecedented number of videos are now needed more than ever before.

To get started, map out a few simple ideas of different types of videos you might want to create. This can include the following:

Fun product videos

Video tutorials and how-to content

Brand-building content

Sales announcements

UGC contest announcements

Hashtag campaign content

Once you do this, collect a number of video clips and images, creating new ones if you need to. Graphic design software like Snappa can help with this, and increasing numbers of marketing videos are now shot with iPhones, so don’t get intimidated here. You’ll likely be able to use many of the images and video clips multiple times over in different combinations to create a large number videos quickly.

The final way to really succeed with this strategy is use social media scheduling software like Agorapulse (pictured below), Sprout Social, or Hootsuite. Once your videos are created, upload an even mix of the different types of content, with a minimum of one video per week per platform, not including Stories content (which should use video every other day at minimum).

This will keep your posts organized and ensure you’re getting the most out of the video content you worked so hard to create.

Conclusion

I’ve often heard several small businesses and clients express that they wish they could use a big-business strategy and execute it themselves. Sure, you may not be able to drop 2M on an influencer for your commercials, so there are limitations in marketing, but social video marketing isn’t one of them.

Social video marketing is accessible, it just needs to be scalable, too. The right tools and strategies are key here, so understand what your audience needs, get your content ready, and start creating and publishing.

Ana is an expert business writer and ghostwriter. She writes about social media and content marketing for sites like Social Media Examiner, AdEspresso, ShortStack, and more, though she writes in a variety of other niches. She can be contacted at anagotter.com. … View full profile ›